Is There Anything de Blasio Would Not do For Money and Power?

LostMessiah, April 22, 2016

Amongst the hundreds of thousands of dollars de Blasio ever raised in campaign funds and bundled contributions are not only donations from Jona Rechnitz and Jeremy Reichberg but from their many companies. R $ R are currently being investigated for gifts for favors schemes involving high ranking New York City Police Department officials.

Mayor de Blasio has repeatedly denied the allegations or feigned ignorance of the related investigations.

“The big picture: Team de Blasio has been a money vacuum since he took office. Bharara’s doubtless looking into whether the flows of cash were illicitly structured to seem to comply with the law.

People with business before the city gave huge and unlimited sums to CONY, which wasn’t bound by campaign-finance laws.

The mayor’s team also arranged for huge sums to go to upstate Democratic county committees — sums then diverted to candidates who couldn’t legally receive them directly. That looks very much like an end-run around the campaign laws.”

Additional Sources:

Follow de Blasio’s money: Too many favors for too many donors

“Bill de Blasio put up the for-sale sign on City Hall before it was even his to occupy — and now state and federal investigators are hard at work following the money.

New York City provides politicians with America’s most generous, tightly regulated public campaign financing. By strictly limiting how much anyone may give to a candidate, as well as how much a candidate may spend, the system is designed to banish legalized bribery.

To maintain his image as Mr. Pure Progressive, de Blasio professes full dedication to taxpayer-financed campaigns. To maintain power, he has played a cynical big-money game by benefiting from largely unregulated political committees that had everything to do with achieving his goals, including his election.

As surely as money follows power, the committees attracted outsized contributions from players who wanted one blessing or another from the mayor — and then de Blasio signaled that very generous givers could get their money’s worth by getting his maximum attention and effort.

And never could the city’s top ethics watchdog and anti-corruption cop, Investigation Commissioner Mark Peters, say boo because Peters had served as de Blasio’s campaign treasurer.

On Friday, Peters announced that he would play no role in the burgeoning probes, which is to say that Peters is disqualified from fulfilling the highest responsibility of the job. Letter of resignation to follow. (See editorial below.)

The mayor says, insists, repeats and reiterates that his intentions — like winning universal pre-K — were pure and that never has any quid come close to any quo. Take him at his word — he still repaid many a money debt.”

By Azi Paybarah in Manhattan, Jimmy Vielkind in Albany, and Mike Allen in D.C., with Daniel Lippman

PROBING DE BLASIO, CONTINUED — How he helped raise money for Democrats in 2014 — Times’ J. David Goodman, William Neuman and William Rashbaum: “What prosecutors investigating the State Senate fund-raising effort appear to be seeking … is evidence of a scheme to use the county committees to illegally redistribute contributions to candidates favored by Mr. de Blasio. There seemed to be little question where the money sent to county committees should ultimately end up, officials with the committees said. ‘We were told, before we got it, how it was going to be used,’ said Louis Epstein, the first vice chairman of the Democratic committee in Putnam County … A review of state campaign records and voluntary disclosures by Mr. de Blasio’s nonprofit show an interlocking web of donors with interests before the city. Beyond the labor unions, which give lavishly to Democratic campaigns in any election, there are men with little prior experience as major donors in New York politics on the rolls of local and state campaign committees …